I've taught myself how to do it over the years - part of the solution is to recognise when you're in a mood to throw out emotional baggage, and the stored crap associated with it. Anything I haven't used in the past two years is unlikely to be used again, so it goes either for recycling or to charity. There are exceptions, of course - my reindeer skin, pocket TV, tennis shoes and velvet coat. I *hate* small bits of paper and get rid of them ASAP.

I was once sorely tempted to put everything I owned in a large pile and cover it in paraffin and set fire to it, and then sod off to Tibet and join a monastery. Still, in my more lucid moments, this strikes me as an eternally good idea.

I've moved accomdation quite a few times in the past year this made me quickly realise that junk should be thrown away. I now can fit all my possessions in the back of my car. But as I'm looking into buying a house in the near future no doubt that my stuff will expand to fill as much space as I buy!

[Lib] You'd be amazed. I've owned a house for two years and have gone from being a man with a bed and a stereo to being a man with a bigger stereo, widescreen TV, surround sound, kitchen tables, bookcases, tools, and no less than 3 sofas. My stuff has expanded to fill my house and I could probably fill my neighbour's house with what's in the loft. How it happened I do not know. My advice to you is that, once you have a home of your own and space in which to store things, that things suddenly gravitate towards you. Learn to sidestep them....

Avoid storage. If you buy things like cupboards, boxes, drawers, shelves to store all that junk then you just give yourself more space to fill with more junk which requires more storage and so on until you reach the point where to have more storage, you need a bigger house. You move to a bigger house which involves packing, so you throw away about 50% of your junk and end up in a house with loads of space. Ideal for filling with junk.

Virtually everything I own is 2nd hand and at the end of its usefulness just goes back to the charity shop. All, that is except my own compulsive obsessive collection of CDs. They stay.

I have heard that men suffer far more from OCD than women (examples include trainspotters, twichers and - ahem - sexual fanatics) and that this is linked to autism - thus linking maleness with communication problems. Anyone else heard of this?

[Bob] I think men do indeed suffer more from OCD then women, but I'm not necessarly sure that I'd call trainspotters obsessive. Like all things in life its not black and white. I think one of the main criteria for a diagnosis of OCD to be made is the fact that it inteferes with normal life and the intense feelings that come from not doing the compulsion. Linking maleness with communication problems is quite a vast step, can I turn the tables and suggest that women communicate too much?

[Bob] I fear for your chickens when they reach the end of their egg productivity ;-).
OCD - I always thought it affected males and females equally and this might support that [unless they do things differently over there].
[Lib] Have just spotted your post as I was simul-ing - I agree - the link between the two is a HUGE step.

did u know ur a googlewhack? its penchant gazump

[paul] Who ... me? :-)

chalky] Nah - chickens are safe. Anyway, they are a variety that remain productive until they are 7 years old!
Lib] sorry - yes, trainspotting is not really OCD but I felt it may be linked to the kind of one-dimensional thought processes that males sometimes exhibit. I know loads of blokes who obsess about everything from computers to sport - girls seem to share this 'single mindedness' only when it concerns self preservation and children. Am I being extremely unfair to my own gender? Regarding communication - I find it incredibly difficult to talk to other men unless I share a passion with them, or are they are effeminate. In social situations, I enjoy hearing women and effeminate men talk because you are so much better at discussing emotional subjects.

I do actually suffer from an OCD which I now have more or less under some form of control, the details of which I will not go into, but I can say from very very painful experience that trainspotting has nothing in common, nothing whatsoever, not even close, not so much a different ballpark but a different sport played by the wrong rules by people trained in scuba diving wearing spacesuits. Believe me, a true OCD is life-destroying, it's all consuming to the point where you cannot function at all, you forget to eat, you forget to sleep, you care only about your OCD. Obsessive behaviour is very common in males, especially I think with the type of males who frequent this type of website (myself included), but it's not a disorder.

It is interesting that the terms 'nerd' and 'geek' are usually applied to the male gender and that may be because - sweeping generalisation alert - they appear to be more pastime/hobby/enthusiast/fancier orientated. Perhaps they have more time on their hands?
BTW Bob - how would you define an 'effeminate' man? Are you referring to those of a homosexual persuasion or those who are in touch with their feminine side?

Bob] Methinks that living in a house with three females doesn't help you in this. I must admit I like talking to girls as well ;o)

On the subject of hobbies - I wonder if this is a cultural thing. It might be that young boys are more often encouraged to persue their hobbies and interests. I can's offer any observations about young girls cos neither I nor my brother was one. And I suspect that by the time we stopped being scared of them, and actually started liking them, this was unlikely to be the kind of question we were interested in. So what do parents get their daughters doing?

[rab] good question and one which I'm sort of qualified to put my two pennorth in, being the only girl with three brothers as well as mother of girls. Boys [in general] are happy to pursue a hobby on their own. Girls [in general] are more responsive to peer group pressure and prefer to do the hobby stuff with their friends. My 13-year old is far more enthusiastic about the drama club that all her cool friends attend, than the piano lessons where she has to go it alone, even though she is far more talented piano-wise than drama-wise.

As a child I spent a lot of time playing with my brother. As he was older this generally consisted on him chasing me, him jumping on me, him spraying me with a hose then locking me out of the house. And other activities like rugby, scalelectrix, hockey and taunting. But I did possess dolls and played with them with my female friends when I wasn't being terrorised by my big bro! My mum was particularly keen for me to persue my hobbies chosen by her, eg piano and violin practice which went down about as well as the insults from my brother!

[FG] Well done for getting it under control, and long may it continue. I've heard that its worse than a herion addiction, so it can't have been easy.

Re: throwing things away (or not, as the case may be) - I don't suffer from OCD, but I do exhibit a fair number of ADD behaviours¹. ADD is apparently quite often misdiagnosed as OCD, depending on the particular collection of behaviours exhibited. The behaviour which leads to collecting massive amounts of stuff is a decision making shortfall.

[1] ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) is a bad name, but it is also the name assigned to whatever ADD is. Personally, I don't think it's a disorder of the individual so much as a mismatch between how society trains people to behave and how some people's brains work, but there we are. The effect is much the same.

Rab] I'm a dad with girls. I've not tried to push dresses or football on them, but they are naturally girly. Friends with boys agree, gender stereotypes are produced by the child choosing the behaviour patterns that they feel most comfortable with.
Chalky] (Beware - beware more sweeping generalisations) I mean those with the (generally) female characteristic of being able to communicate. This includes homosexual men. Some of the people I get on with best are gay because I like the way they can empathise. One of my best friends is only so because he made a pass at me. I, however, am hetero.
st d] Yeah - seven females vv me... sometimes I crave for a blokey night out at the local where we can eat raw (freshly hunted) buffalo steak and drink gallons of beer after a night wolf-whistling, playing rugby and mud wrestling.

Well Mr Bob the Dog, I can help you out in the drinking beer stakes, but I think I will leave the mud-wrestling to the others.

Oh I wasn't clear - mud wrestling (with) girls :o)

OCD-no.
ADD-most likely; never been diagnosed as such but I suspect it's the case.
Me & women-I can talk to women on a strictly professional basis. However, if it gets even mildly personal (and I'm not sufficiently pissed), I basically turn into a paralyzed crab. Of course, talking Linux and cricket (sometimes simultaneously) doesn't draw the hotties here in Pittsburgh. :|

[Dr Q] I was only diagnosed because the coping strategies I had developed made me depressed. I self-treated and resolved to stop using those coping strategies, but then I wasn't coping and I became depressed.

I wanted to write a little about how much I respected FG and Dunx for coping with OCD and ADD and having the courage to express it here. However, I'm a bloke, so I could never do a thing like that because it may reveal my blousey emotional side ;o)

[Bob] Hear hear. Also to Dr Q for disclosing paralysed crab tendencies when faced with laydeez who don't necessarily wish to talk business. Now that surprised me a little, although it shouldn't really - we often assume we 'know' someone based on our familiarity with their online persona.

It's a lot easier to sound sophisticated and erudite when you have the time to pick your words carefully. For example, if this were a face-to-face conversation, I probably wouldn't have said 'erudite' just now.

Have ADD, only officially 'labelled' in 2000. However, like many 'sufferers', I have a high IQ, and had learnt to disguise it over the years, along with my lysdexia

deslyxia
axeldysi
dislexya
ah! Daily Sex! I think I'll keep that one...

My proclivity for the amassment of huge piles of 'stuff' has absolutely nothing to do with ADD/OCD or any other disorder - apart from disorder itself; it is pure and unadulterated laziness. I do not collect objects in the sense of an aim in itself. I have, over many decades, learned to live with this affliction and simply accept it as 'me'. I do sympathise with those who have such leanings - that's the compulsive side of a personality - as I have had something similar for many, many years now but which is not at all related to the collection/arrangement side of things ... no, I'm not going into it here.

[Riff] You are correct, to a point, but is it just that you are afeared that the other parties to a conversation may be ignorant of the meaning of certain words and, therefore, you 'lower' your language to the level that you surmise is acceptable?

I did a test online today for those. Luckily, I appeared to score low on pretty much every disorder, although I tested as "moderate" for Schizotypal, Obsessive-Compulsive, and Paranoid and "High" for Histrionic and Avoidant. Happily, I know what none of these things mean, with the exception of obsessive-compulsive disorder (ocd) which anyone who knows me knows is rubbish (coathangers, anyone?) I'll go with Dujon. I'm just lazy.

Locospotting if you don't mind. As a 12-yr-old I was a locospotter, but it was all steam in those days, and also regarded as quite normal. We all indulged in serious trespass in pursuit of engine numbers. But these days if I see a 30-yr old in an anorak, yes!, at the end of a platform noting the numbers then there's something seriously wrong. It's not OCD; just sad. How can anyone be interested in a sodding diesel? No charisma. And they don't talk.

Can talk business (any time) or small-talk (after a pint) with anyone, male or female, though am often told my small-talking style is much more like a woman's than a man's (well I did learn it from my mother, pretty much a single divorced parent.) Can talk "football/rugby/insert sport of choice here" with anyone in the bar, drunk or sober, owing to fine memory for statistics. Can only talk "personal" with girls, never guys, and only on an abstract basis, otherwise go into paralyzed-crab mode. Actually prefer talking to women rather than men. Frequently have gay men making passes at me - never women (and have an equally annoying tendency to try to chat up women who then turn out to be lesbians. I didn't know there *was* such a thing as reverse gaydar...) Am totally straight and thus pissed off at the above situation.
Not sure about AD(H)D or OCD, but I suspect a reasonable case could be made, especially for the former. And in the latter case, I'm a minor obsessive who hates people that get more obsessive than me (about anything) but defends his right to be *this* obsessive ;-)

there is, of course, scientific proof for each, and severe cases can be quite crippling. On a lighter note, has anyone taken this test? http://www.penddraig.co.uk/pen/tests/sanity.htm

[Chalky] Pro'lly because we've never met in person. Of course, if it's a large enough crowd, I can just go about being the sarcastic, heavily vulgar, semi-humourous arsehole I usually am.
Then again, most members of the American female persuasion find me decidedly unattractive anyway, so I don't have to put up with it that often.

And as for rubbish...I'm a packrat. Nothing will be thrown out. EVER.

[ZK] 30.1%. Am I nuts?